Pronunciation · Words with fewer syllables than they look
How to pronounce “vegetable”
VEJ-tuh-bul
3 syllables · stress on “VEJ”
In short
Say “vegetable” in 3 steps
- 1Three syllables: VEJ-tuh-bul.
- 2The second e is silent — go straight from the /dʒ/ to the /t/.
- 3Stress the first syllable and keep the last two short and light.
The version to avoid
Commonly said as: ve-ge-TA-ble — four syllables, sounding the second e
The second e is written but never spoken. Learners who sound out the word letter by letter produce a four-syllable version that immediately marks the speech as non-native.
Hear real people say it
Model audio is consistent; real speech is not. Hearing several actual speakers is what makes a word recognisable when someone says it at full speed.
Real speakers
2 human recordingsActual people saying “vegetable”, not a synthetic voice. Real speech varies — that variation is what you need to recognise, and what a single model voice cannot show you.
Recordings from Wikimedia Commons by Association Shtooka, Judith Franck and No machine-readable author provided. Dvortygirl assumed (based on copyright claims)., licensed under CC BY 3.0 us / CC BY-SA 3.0. Full credits.
Practise it out loud
Reading about a sound does not change your mouth. Say it, hear it back, and fix one thing at a time.
Say it yourself
0/6 practisedListen first, then record. You get feedback on the individual sounds, the stress and the rhythm — no account needed, and nothing is stored.
Recordings are used only to generate this feedback and are not stored. Your accent is never penalised: IELTS scores intelligibility, and so do we.
The sounds inside this word
Each links to a full guide with mouth position, audio and drills. If a word keeps failing, the problem is usually one of these.
Don't confuse it with…
Minimal pairs isolate the exact contrast this word depends on — the fastest way to train both ear and mouth.
Who finds this word hardest
Your first language predicts which part of a word will break. These guides list the highest-impact fixes for each.
- Hindi speakers: Hindi speakers' single highest-impact fix is the v/w merger: Hindi has one sound (व) where English has two, so 'wine' and 'vine' collapse.
- Bengali speakers: For Bengali speakers the big three are: /f/ and /v/ hardening into aspirated p and b, /z/ turning into /dʒ/ ('zoo' → 'joo'), and s/sh swapping, plus an extra vowel breaking up consonant clusters (school → ischool).
- Spanish speakers: Spanish has 5 pure vowels where English has around 20, so the highest-impact work for Spanish speakers is vowel contrasts (ship/sheep, cat/cut) plus the b/v merger and the extra 'e' that sneaks in before s-clusters (eSpain).
- Arabic speakers: The signature fix for Arabic speakers is /p/: Arabic has no p, so 'pen' becomes 'ben' and 'park' becomes 'bark'.
More words with fewer syllables than they look
Same pattern, same fix. Learning them as a group is far faster than one at a time.
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Frequently asked questions
How do you pronounce vegetable?
How many syllables are in vegetable?
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